Bringing chatrooms to Twitter

Twitter is an incredibly useful tool. However, over time we found that we started using Twitter for conversation rather than simple status updates. One thing that irked us was that we could not send messages to non-Twitter friends. We’ve fixed that with our initial version of Twitter integration. Now you can chat with Twitter users in Chatterous rooms from the web, your favorite email client, Google Talk/Jabber and your phone…without a Twitter account!

Since messages to/from Chatterous groups are sent as Direct Messages on Twitter you can carry on private conversations as well 🙂

How it works

To add a Twitter user to a Chatterous group, simply add their Twitter username after clicking on the ‘Add People’ button. Once they follow the chtr user, they can send and receive group messages via DM.

For example, if I had a group with the short name ‘myfriends’, I can now message the group from Twitter via direct message:

d chtr myfriends Hey everyone!

This will send the message ‘Hey everyone!’ to the ‘myfriends’ Chatterous group.

Linking your Chatterous account to Twitter

If you have a Chatterous account you can add Twitter as one of your contacts. Navigate to your profile and add your Twitter username under ‘Ways to reach you’. You’ll be asked to follow the chtr user and get an authorization code DM’ed to you on Twitter. Simply enter the authorization code on Chatterous and you can now receive group messages on the fly via Twitter!

For more information about the various commands available via Twitter, click here.

4 Responses to “Bringing chatrooms to Twitter”

I’m not sure I understand the utility of this scenario. I get that Chatterous is try to enable ubiquitous communication via multiple devices and platforms. But, you already have SMS and IM integration – who would want to use Twitter as the vehicle to send messages?

Since all your Chatterous traffic is “direct” – there is no benefit of having this go through Twitter as the underlying transport layer – none of your user’s Twitter followers will see the messages or know that a conversation is going on. And that’s what seems the primary benefit of Twitter – enabling the impromptu/casual discussions that don’t happen otherwise.

I would think Friend Feed integration would be more useful (do you have that already?) – that way my friends can see that I’m involved in a discussion by following my FF feed.